The present invention relates to an apparatus for electronically identifying a particular item of equipment, and for identifying critical parameters associated with the equipment, and for preserving a historical record of equipment use. In particular, the invention relates to electromechanical systems wherein equipment modules may be interchangeably used, to provide a convenient and portable record of such information which is always a part of the equipment module itself.
The invention finds particular utility in connection with diskette duplication systems, wherein various electromechanical modules are frequently interchangeably used within a disk duplicating system. In such system an electromechanical handler and loader mechanism is positioned adjacent a magnetic disk drive unit, and the handler is arranged to receive a stack of unrecorded diskettes, thereafter sequentially feeding the diskettes into the disk drive unit for recording and checking, and the recorded diskettes are ejected from the magnetic disk drive back into the handler mechanism, where they are moved along to a further handling location. The magnetic disk drive unit is typically a commercially available device, and the system is designed to accommodate drive units manufactured by any number of equipment manufacturers. Various different magnetic drive units are interchangeably connected into the system from time to time, depending upon the diskette recording jobs which are being handled by the system. Each of these magnetic drive units require periodic maintenance, and it is extremely difficult to keep an accurate and ongoing record of the usage of the magnetic drive units in the system because of the frequency of drive unit interchangeability. Further, each magnetic drive unit has a different set of electronic interface characteristics which must be accommodated to the system, and this interface compatibility must be incorporated into the system before each drive unit is operated.
In the prior art, the problem of interchanging magnetic drive units in the foregoing system was solved by requiring the operator to follow a rigorous start-up procedure, wherein the operator would utilize a keyboard or like device to input into the system the various operating parameters which were relevant to the magnetic drive unit connected into the system. Since the system incorporates a computer processor, the keyboard entries were recognizable by the processor, and were used by the processor to set up the desired communications formats for the system. An operator error in setting up these formats could result in a defective diskette recording operation, which could go undetected until such time as the prerecorded diskettes were actually used in another computer system. In some cases, operator errors result in equipment malfunctions, with the need to shut down the system while the equipment was serviced.
Disk duplication is a high-volume business. Thousands of disks may be copied daily by one disk duplicating machine for the copying process to be economically efficient. Accordingly, it is preferable that down time is minimized.
A complicating factor in the commercial disk duplicating business is the availability of a large number of diverse brands and models of disk drives. For example, there are a plurality of models designed for accommodating both 3-1/2 inch diskettes and 5-1/4 inch diskettes, and within this plurality of brands and models there exists a further diversity of magnetic recording techniques and conventions. The task of disk duplication must frequently be accommodated to particular brands and/or models of disk drives, and therefore the disk duplicating machine must be designed so as to interchangeably accept the various disk drive brands and/or models. This problem is solved in industry by designing various mechanical adapters for mounting particular disk drives, which adapters are designed to uniformly position the disk drive access openings and lever actuators for engagement by the disk duplicating machine. Such adapters enable a "quick-change" of disk drives to accommodate disk duplicating jobs for the variety of such machines.
In the prior art, after the operator mounts the correct disk drive in the disk duplicator machine, the operator refers to a crib sheet to enter configuration information such as the bit window margin default value, the read threshold default value, the drive code of the disk drive, the drive operation of the disk drive, the drive table version code, a code indicating the source for obtaining recording density, the drive part number, the drive size, the tracks per inch, the drive media density, the drive mode, the low density media information, the high density media information, the drive align interval, and the drive clean interval. Of course, the entering of such data is prone to human error.